But then, there was something about the story of the fire that proved to be irresistible. As he reaches for a book from the shelf and inhales its pages, the librarian tells her, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.”Ī staff writer for the New Yorker, Orlean has authored numerous books and articles and, at that moment, had decided she would give it up.

It’s still the single biggest library fire in US history. In a casual conversation with the librarian, she discovered an unsolved arson occurring in 1986, destroying nearly a half-million books and damaging 700,000 more in that very place. When Orlean’s family moved to Los Angeles and her son wanted to interview a librarian, it serendipitously opened doors to the stately and historically-preserved downtown public library. “I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.” As she matures, the affection is transferred to books and to the wondrous worlds they can reveal. In truth, it’s a series of love stories, starting with memories about the closeness Orlean felt to her mother while on their frequent trips to the public library in Cleveland, Ohio. The saga of a similar, but much larger, conflagration is at the core of a new work by Susan Orlean, The Library Book (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

So it’s easy to imagine the entire town of Greenville grieving if that austere public building burned in a massive fire-how it would affect everyone in its vicinity, how the community would gather to watch the inferno and how everyone would join together in the aftermath to rebuild. It’s ironic that the subject for this review is a library, given this monthly offering appears in the Greenville Public Library literary magazine.

The library book orlean review